Glenn Urquhart, GROUP CREATIVE DIRECTOR, LIFESTYLE CHANNELS - FOXTEL. Keynote: "Evolve your Transmedia"
While rather a difficult keynote to follow (Mr Urquhart you could win the award for most words spoken in a single minute), I did manage to write down a few key messages about producing transmedia campaigns.
Glenn promoted the simple rule of understanding the traditional conventions of literature, art, and filmmaking, so you can turn them on their head and subvert them through juxtaposition. When you understand art, you understand us, people.
As storytellers, we're writers so we should take the writers approach. Its important to experience sub cultures beyond what you normally do, live through other people, read, watch, and listen to as much as you possibly can. The ridiculous and sublime is happening everywhere around you. Inspiration is everywhere. By understanding the conventions of art, you'll understand us. When you subvert the traditional conventions, you'll produce more emotional responses.
The Grand Daddy of transmedia campaigns - the Dark Knight campaign - illustrates the power of these productions. 10 million people from over 75 countries participated in a mass alternative reality game where The Joker left his mark in public places to produce an army of followers around the world. Phone calls, emails, user generated photos, public protests for the fictional mayor Harvey Dent, interactive games, video - all were used to produce the biggest hype about the film leading up to the premiere in 2008. Glenn noted that by giving people the power to make stories with your brand, you can make it bigger success than if you had tried it yourself. This is what transmedia storytelling is about.
TVNZ produced a similar campaign for Shortland Street, a New Zealand series that normally attracts a 30% share each night. On a smaller scale, the producers had to deliver fans online content for 5 weeks during the summer break. A transmedia clue hunt was born in which content was released via social, text messages, videos, anagrams, voice calls, emails, and traditional media. 60,000 people visited the site on one day alone and 17,000 was averaged per day. When the new season launched after 5 weeks, they pulled a 53% share for first episode, an unprecedented event.
Transmedia campaigns with a dense rich story with a large fan base are generally successful. If you don't have that fan service, you need to speak to your niche. This guarantees you will get that shareability - if you can't, go for the emotional uppercut. Don't be afraid to commit, you must commit 500%. Creativity can be brought down just to being bold.
At Foxtel, Glenn discussed transmedia campaigns made for the Lifestyle Channel and Embarrassing Bodies Downunder. To launch the new show, they personified 6 ailments into The Unspeakables using music, videos, a content-rich website, toys, and other online content marketing the general principles of the show. The result was a higher than expected share for the launch of the new show when it released. As well as this, Foxtel are working on a transmedia project as part of H100 called Life in the Trenches a where a trench is built outside the opera house and participants try to find out which soldier whilst travelling from one end of the trench to the other, eventually finding out if they survived the trenches or died on the battlefield.
Glenn's speech highlighted the key important fact that when it comes to transmedia, there is no limit other than your willingness to commit to an idea and deliver the project. Budgets can be large or small. Audiences can be mass collected or niche. Either way, everyone has the opportunity to produce something unique through transmedia storytelling.
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